creasing taxation, and diminishing in effect the amount of the national debt; as well as by the encouragement it gave to agricul tural improvements, through the stimulus of a rising market and the facility of obtaining credit and loans to any amount. The price of every commodity was high, but money was proportionably cheap; and the universal warfare in which we were engaged, had, although perhaps unexpectedly, the effect of a universal protection duty on the importation of every species of agricultural produce, But as soon as the war had terminated, with a degree of success which far outstript the most sanguine expectation; as soon as the prospect of many years of peace and security had restored the precarious and suspected Funds to nearly their former value; as soon as the prospect of being called upon for payment in specie had induced the Bank Directors, and the endless host of country bankers, to curtail their issues, and had thereby essentially restored the credit and the value of the paper currency; the moment that the peace and such a glorious peace!was hailed by the nation as the sure harbinger of plenty, prosperity, and happiness unknown before-at that very moment of general exultation, the great, the widely diffused agricultural interest discovered, to their utter astonishment and dismay, that half their property had disappeared like a dream; while, to add to their misery and despair, the same amount of taxes and charges continued to be exacted on the remaining half.

This great work of destruction, which began with the cultivators of the soil, extended itself immediately to its proprietors; and very soon after to the manufacturing and commercial classesto all who are supported by labor and industry-to four-fifths of the community: while the fundholders, annuitants, placemen, and capitalists, not only escaped the general wreck uninjured, but have actually derived therefrom an increase of property and income, in proportion nearly to the losses of the landed and commercial interest.

That this cause alone would have been sufficient to produce great and extensive calamity there cannot be a doubt, had none other existed; but unfortunately other causes have combined to swell the tide of destruction. Of these, some of minor importance have been, as above observed, sedulously pointed out and copiously dilated on by Ministers and their adherents; as if with the design of thereby diverting the attention of the public from the greater causes of mischief; on account of which their own conduct and want of foresight might be brought into question: such, for instance, are the cessation at the peace of government contractsthe disappearance in the markets, of government purveyors-the fayorable course of Exchange with foreign nations-a succession

of plentiful crops, at home and abroad, &c. &c.; while by far the most important of all is seldom or never alluded to―viz. the criminal neglect of a Corn Bill, until it was too late to prevent the mischief; the illusory, inoperative, and insufficient nature of that Corn Bill when passed; and the ruinous neglect, even now, of protecting duties for other agricultural commodities, without which, the little that is left of agricultural property will soon we swept away, through the unjust and impolitic preference thus given to the foreign agriculturist.

It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to estimate exactly, the portion of mischief which arose from each of these causes respectively. Taking the fall in agricultural stock and produce at sixty per cent. on the average; of this, thirty per cent. nust be placed to the account of the altered value of the current medium, from twenty to twenty-five per cent. must be considered to have arisen from the unprotected state of agricultural produce, and the remaining five or ten per cent, may be attributed to the cessation of government contracts, or to the cessation of the war, properly speaking. Were that portion, therefore, of the present distress, which was occasioned by the transition from war to peace, the only evil we had to struggle with, the national energy-the persevering efforts of skill and industry-might be expected to surmount it. But that is but a trifling share of the calamity under which we labor, and were that part of it entirely relieved, and blotted out of the account, no sensible alleviation of the general distress would thence ensue. The loss of property to the occupiers of land, by the alteration in the currency and unprotected state of agriculture, to the amount of not less than 150 millions of pounds sterling, has, of itself alone, reduced to indigence threefourths of the agricultural population: the destructive effect of which, upon the manufacturing and commercial part of the community, must of necessity prove alarmingly great.

Neither does the mischief stop here: not only are the fruits of former industry lost for ever, but an insurmountable barrier is interposed to prevent the British agriculturist from ever again emerging from indigence. Bound hand and foot with impolitic restrictions, and overwhelmed with a weight of taxes and imposts which augment to an incalculable degree the cost of production; he is forced to contend in an unequal struggle with the foreign grower, who is comparatively untaxed and unburthened, and who is therefore enabled to bring his produce into the British market ,, nearly thirty per cent. cheaper than the native produce, after paying the cost of freight, insurance, and mercantile profit. The British farmer must therefore (on all except perhaps the most fertile portions of land) abandon his trade altogether; or continue carrying it on for a time in an inert and languid manner, without any

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adequate return for his capital and labor, and actually with a clear sinking of capital in most instances. From such a state of things the rapid decline of agriculture, and of all those concerned with it, must necessarily ensue, with a proportionable fall of rents; and, in fact, the ruin of the whole landed interest in its most comprehensive sense. Those who escaped immediate and total destruction at the peace, through the alteration in the current medium, seem destined to inevitable destruction by this second fatal blow, which the legislature seem determined to inflict upon that ill-fated race; or, which is the same thing, seem determined not to ward off from their devoted heads. But their misfortunes will not terminate with themselves. The ruin or impoverishment of the landed interest, must infallibly ruin or impoverish the rest of the community; not only through their increased demand for support on the poor's rates, and individual charity, but likewise through their diminished capacity of purchasing manufactured and mercantile commodities; from the sale of which another great division of the public draw their subsistence.

The depreciation of landed property, great as it is, has not in general kept pace with that of produce; because some of the most active of the depressing causes of produce were of a temporary nature, and might be expected to blow over: such as the glut from importation, the redundancy from two or three successive plentiful crops, and above all, the necessity the farmer was under of hurrying to a falling market a double quantity of produce, whereby the prices were reduced even below the real level of their necessary and permanent depression. While produce, therefore, sustained a fall of fifty or sixty per cent., land has not fallen on the average more than thirty per cent.: but a depression of thirty per cent. on land amounts to the enormous sum of three hundred millions of pounds sterling and upwards! One third of every man's landed estate has been virtually. cut off, or a mortgage to that amount extorted in favor of the fundholders and monied men, through the legerdemain chiefly of paper money and the Bank Restriction Acts.

But, say the Ministers and other votaries of the funding system, the distress is only of a temporary nature, the effect merely of the transition from war to peace, and will work its own cure by time and patience! Gentlemen who use an argument like this, must needs entertain a mean opinion of the reasoning faculties of those to whom it is addressed. Time or patience can never restore to its miserable owners the 150 millions of agricultural stock and produce lost by the fall of prices at the peace, through the juggle of paper currency, and the improvident want of protection against foreign importation. That enormous mass of capital is lost to them and to the country for ever. It is gone no man knows where, and nobody seems to be the better for it. The ignorant la

borer or mechanic, the covetous tradesman, the short-sighted manufacturer, rejoiced for a moment, at the golden prospect of a large loaf, with the most sovereign indifference to the groans of the perishing agriculturist-dragged from affluence to a jail, or turned out of his comfortable dwelling to break stones on the highway. Never can I forget the barbarous apathy, not unmixed with sentiments of pleasure and satisfaction, so generally manifested towards that unfortunate and much injured class of men. As if it were nothing for a man who was fairly possessed of a thousand pounds to-day, to find himself worth less than five hundred to-morrow, by circumstances which he could neither foresee nor comprehend, and over which he had no control: or, that the case of a million and a half of persons so circumstanced, deserved neither pity nor consideration. Yet such is the fact. The proportion of loss here stated has been sustained by every individual agriculturist, from one end of the kingdom to the other, without almost an exception; and in numberless instances. it was still more severe and ruinous. For if any person, thus possessed of a thousand pounds, at the termination of the war, wholly employed in agriculture, had chanced to have borrowed a hundred pounds, or two, from a country banker, who was commonly an Attorney, he was sure to be a ruined man—and in the course of three months not worth a single farthing. Many such cases have come actually under mine own eye, and I doubt not they are every where to be found. Yet such is the short-sighted selfishness of the rest of the community, that nobody pities them. "O! they might have been more prudent and saving, and not have dressed their wives so fine, nor sent their daughters to boarding-schools!" As if, forsooth, one law were to be made for the farmer, and another for the rest of the nation!-As if skill, industry, and capital, in his hands, were not to be suffered to reap their usual reward !—As if, in fact, the cultivators of the ground were a race of Helots, mere hewers of wood and drawers of water for the rest of the community!

Did any man ever question the right of a tanner, a shoemaker, a ship-owner, or a Manchester weaver, to become rich by his industry and the improvement of his capital; to educate his children, or to drink his wine? What monstrous selfishness, what shameless effrontery, would deny an equal right to the farmer-the first of Englishmen, the main pillar of the State? They have, however, had their revenge, were that an object of concern. Their unfeeling opponents had for once a belly-full, through their ruin-and but for once. Short was the triumph of this short-sighted, narrow-minded, and sordid policy; and soon was discovered the ephemeral nature of a prosperity founded on the injury and destruction of their fellow subjects. The loaf was indeed cheap and large, but to their surprise and disappointment, they found it was farther

than ever out of their reach. Cheap as it was, it required some money to purchase it; but now they could find no employment whereby alone it could be earned, even at the utmost reduction of wages. No man can more sincerely lament than me, the misery of these deluded people; yet this was, in one point of view, as it ought to be: and if nations and governments were capable of learning wisdom from experience-which is very doubtful the salutary lesson might out-value the price that has been paid for it, great as it is.

Such being the chief and essential causes of the present national distress, how ridiculous it is to talk of its being only of a temporary nature, and which will work its own cure by time and patience? The distress consists in the annihilation of such enormous masses of property and disposable income or rather in their abstraction from the rightful owners-viz. the whole of the landed and agricultural interest, and the whole of the industrious classes; whereby the sources of employment to the laborious part of the community are necessarily dried up. When to the 800 millions sunk in the value of land, and the 150 millions lost on agricultural stock and produce, by the causes above detailed, is added the loss on manufacturing and commercial property by the recent alteration in the currency alone, it is unnecessary to look for other farfetched causes of the national distress: and the time and patience necessary for the restoration of such vast and stupendous losses, would surpass all reasonable comprehension. No, my Lord! the disease is much too serious to be left to time, and chance, and nature's efforts. The cure can alone depend on the Restitution, in some shape or other, of the enormous property of which the great body of the nation have been so grossly outwitted, and so unmercifully stript: and this can alone be effected by legislative interference. Nothing short of this will do: nothing short of this can be of any sensible utility in alleviating the national distress. Disguise it how they may, such is the disease and such the only remedy; and timid procrastination must in this, as in other dangerous maladies, prove certainly fatal,

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But hows itewill be asked, is this restitution to be made? How is it possible, were it just? And how is it consistent with justice were it possible? in ani

It must certainly be confessed, that in many cases such restitution is utterly impracticable. The myriads of farmers, for instance, who have lost their all, through the consequences of the Bank Restriction Act and the unprotected state of agriculture; and who now drag out a miserable existence, either in jail, or as parish paupers or laborers on the highways, can never be restored to their former place in society. But something might nevertheless be done to retard the progress of the mischief: something might be done to prevent those, who have hitherto been plundered of